Here’s what Baptists said at Rededicate 250

Despite a lack of religious diversity among the speakers at the Trump administration’s “Rededicate 250” event held last Sunday on the National Mall, conservative Baptists played a prominent role.

The speaker lineup for the nine-hour religious festival included two Catholics and one Jewish rabbi, but all the rest were conservative evangelicals with proven loyalty to President Donald Trump.

Robert Jeffress, Jack Graham, Jonathan Pokluda, Jonathan Falwell and Mike Johnson all are Baptists. And even Franklin Graham is Baptist adjacent. These speakers do not represent the breadth of Baptists in America but do align with the Southern Baptist Convention and the independent Baptists that support Trump.

Here’s what these six speakers had to say about God and country.

Christian nationalists, victorious over their enemies

“In March of 1776, as the American colonies stood on the brink of war against the most powerful empire in the world, it was the second Continental Congress that called for a day of fasting and prayer. The day would be May 17, 1776, exactly 250 years ago today,” Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas began. “It would be a day, our forefathers said, when we would call on God. It would be a day that we would repent of our sins. It was a day that we would boldly ask God to give us victory over our enemies.”

That’s quite an ironic prayer, given how Jesus called his followers to lay down their swords, turn the other cheek and love their enemies rather than claim victory over their enemies through the sword. But it’s an irony that seemed lost on Jeffress because he has more important concerns at hand — namely using religion to take power.

“These leaders who loved our country and loved our God would be called Christian nationalists today.”

“These leaders who loved our country and loved our God would be called Christian nationalists today. And it is a title they would’ve gladly embraced,” he asserted, as if he knew the minds of the Founders.

Then Jeffress added to the cheers of the crowd, “If being a Christian nationalist means loving Jesus Christ and loving America, count me in!”

Jeffress went on to say the strength of the United States lies in the “strength of our armies” and “the strength of our God.”

And as many speakers throughout the day did, Jeffress paired what he considered to be the actions of God at our nation’s past to the actions of God today. “The same God who gave us victory over our enemies in the past promises to give us victory today,” he declared.

The question is, who do men like Jeffress think are our enemies?

The second Civil War

“Today we are here to recognize those words. ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” said Jonathan Falwell of Liberty University and Thomas Road Baptist Church.

And what of the Americans who don’t share his theology? They are the source of division.

“Today, we see division in our nation. We see anger and we see contempt. We see brother against brother, sister against sister. We know that this cannot stand,” Falwell said. In other words, those dissenters need to align with his vision for the nation.

These differences should resolve with everyone submitting to being “one nation under God,” specifically to a God characterized by “overruling power,” he said.

Scapegoating LGBTQ people

Franklin Graham is Baptist adjacent. His father, Billy Graham, was a member of First Baptist Dallas from 1953 to 2008, when he transferred his membership to First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, S.C. And Franklin, who has followed in his father’s footsteps, was inducted into the Southern Baptist Evangelists Hall of Faith in 2014.

The younger Graham, an avowed fan of the president, began by framing the modern struggle in the United States as a struggle to be freed “from the rule of sins that are weakening the foundations of our great republic.”

Quoting 2 Timothy, Graham specifically named as sins people being “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power.”

While most of us would associate those negative traits as describing Trump, that’s not how Graham sees it. Instead, these traits describe the threats of “transgenderism” and same-sex marriage, which he called “just the tip of the iceberg” of America’s moral problem.

In Graham’s view, transgender people and gay people are more of a threat than Trump.

Comparing Trump to Joshua

After thanking “our president and commander-in-chief” for his call to worship — a prerecorded Scripture reading — Jack Graham compared Trump to Joshua in the Hebrew Bible.

“There was a commander in chief 3,000 years ago by the name of Joshua,” Graham began. “He and the children of Israel stood on the brink of blessing. They’re about to cross over the River Jordan and into the Promised Land. God had given them life and liberty, setting them free from the powers of Satan and Egypt. They wandered in the wilderness for those 40 years. A generation died off. But now they are ready to go in and to take the blessing and the promise that God had already given them to possess the land. But before they crossed over, Joshua stood before the people and he said, ‘Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.”

Trump and his allies often claim he is ushering in the “golden age” of America. And their language of prosperity sounds like a promised land.

Graham’s analogy is ripe with complications, especially for those who understand how the religious and political right are attempting to erase our past and rewrite history. As I shared in my previous piece about the weekend, Sean Feucht opened his event Saturday night with a Native American on stage while thanking God for the work of revival God did in the colonies to give birth to our nation.

And as Eric Metaxas claimed, the right apparently believes the Founders “were all fire-breathing, born-again believers. And even those that weren’t agreed with all the doctrines.” Metaxas also claimed the Founders understood the narrative of the United States to be one of “reestablishing the Sinai Covenant,” where the U.S. would “govern ourselves the way the Israelites did at Sinai.”

According to these men, the land on which we live was the Promised Land, given to the white colonizers who came over from Europe. Their words echo former Union military leader David Payne, who like the organizers of Rededicate 250 also utilized Christian hymnody to support his rise to power. Payne’s favorite Scripture upon taking land from Native Americans was, “And the Lord commanded unto Moses, ‘Go forth and possess the Promised Land.’” And his favorite worship song to fuel support for his cause was “On to Beulah Land,” which says: “I’ve reached the land of corn and wine, and all its riches freely mine.”

Many conservative Baptists will rejoice in Graham’s call for personal salvation. But in addition to sharing the gospel of penal substitutionary atonement, his overall presentation played into the hands of the Christian supremacist mythology of our nation’s past. While his message may not have been as explicitly threatening as the others on Sunday, context matters.

Like the ancient Israelites, Graham said, “We’re on the brink of blessing in our nation.” But to receive this blessing, Graham says we must “keep the commandments that God has given us and live under the Lordship of Jesus our savior and Lord.”

Baking in the sun

“I don’t know what you want to call it — a movement, a great awakening, an outpouring of the Spirit, a revival. But whatever you call it, it’s not coming. It’s here. It’s already here,” announced Jonathan Pokluda, lead pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.

Of course, only some people were included in this blessing. Pokluda went on to describe the typical conservative Baptist understanding of the gospel. But like the other men, he began with a loaded illustration.

“The way I share the gospel is with two simple questions between 1 and 10,” Pokluda began. “Ten being certain. One being not so sure.” He asked everyone present to put a number on how certain they are about their afterlife destination.

“If you said anything other than a number 10,” then you may be misunderstanding the gospel, he declared.

Debates about atonement theology aside, what Pokluda was doing was promoting the idea of absolute certainty about your beliefs. And the consequences of not having absolute certainty are enormous in his view.

As he put it, there were some present at the event who were “baking in the sun” who were one day going to bake in hell because justice requires that those who don’t submit must “go to hell” and “pay for your sins forever.”

But where is faith in absolute certainty? And what may be the consequences for your neighbor in a democracy when you’re absolutely certain about your beliefs and the consequence of questioning is eternal conscious torment?

And why are we even talking about baking in hell at a U.S. government-sponsored worship event?

The official prayer of rededication

As the day wore on, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who is a Southern Baptist and a former SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee trustee, offered the official prayer of rededication.

Johnson said the Founding Fathers humbled themselves before God. And like them, we also must humble ourselves and confess our sins.

And what sins in particular are those?

“In recent years, we’ve seen sinister ideologies sow confusion and discord among our people,” Johnson confessed. “We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation. These voices insist to the young and impressionable that our story, the American story, is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure, and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins. But Father, we reject that. We rebuke it in your name.”

“We’re supposed to pretend like Feucht, Metaxas and everyone else did over the weekend that our Founding Fathers were all a bunch of inerrantist, complementarian, young earth creationists who were committed to biblical orthodoxy and revival.”

To Johnson and his allies, the greatest sin isn’t the refusal to love God by loving neighbor as self. Instead, the greatest sin is self-awareness.

In the world they run, we’re not allowed to reflect on the trauma we’ve passed down through our genocide and broken treaties with the Native Americans, our slavery and segregation of Black people, our subjugation of women and children, our current war against immigrants and LGBTQ people, or our attempts to silence Black voters. To these white conservative Southern Baptist men, to mention such things is sinister and must be rebuked.

Instead, we’re supposed to pretend like Feucht, Metaxas and everyone else did over the weekend that our Founding Fathers were all a bunch of inerrantist, complementarian, young earth creationists who were committed to biblical orthodoxy and revival.

Or as Johnson claimed in his official rededication prayer, “Over each of our 250 years, America has been a land of hope and liberty, a place of miracles, and the light and glory of all nations.”

Who needs Jesus’ perfect righteousness imputed to them when you could have the United States’ perfect righteousness as your light and glory?

Despite claiming to believe in the hope of the gospel and in Jesus as the Prince of Peace, Johnson suggested the Declaration of Independence is “our nation’s creed” and says it “has also been the inspiration for the single greatest force for peace and justice and human flourishing.”

It’s ironic how so many men who claim their allegiance is to Jesus have essentially cut him out of the narrative.

It’s also ironic, given how many Southern Baptist men have been complicit in sacralizing slavery, misogyny and preying on children, how the Baptist men at Rededicate 250 managed to cast anyone who mentions such history as sinister enemies in a civil war.

But with the entire nation manipulated into a hierarchy with heterosexual white Christian supremacist men, many of whom are conservative Baptists, Johnson announced, “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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